


A Losing Combination?

by Jemisard



Category: Pacific Rim (2013), The Losers - All Media Types
Genre: Alternate Universe - Pacific Rim Fusion
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-08-20
Updated: 2013-08-20
Packaged: 2017-12-24 02:54:40
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,317
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/934453
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Jemisard/pseuds/Jemisard
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Jake Jensen has worked on Jaegers for as long as he's been able to, but his dream of piloting are doomed to die since he just can't Drift with anyone.</p><p>Until his friends Jolene and Pooch seem doomed unless someone gets out there to help them.</p>
            </blockquote>





	A Losing Combination?

**Author's Note:**

  * For [zoronoa](https://archiveofourown.org/users/zoronoa/gifts).



> Thanks to slashersivi who picked up a HUGE glaring problem and nicely pointed it out so I could fix it.

The Mark II, Chat Noir, stood in silent vigil over the hangar bay. She was half way through her refit after the disastrous fight against Hive Host, her control pod resealed and her left arm completed if not armed and armoured yet.

Down the hangar, Grande Morte was being cleaned down after her most recent fight. Jake watched the pilots as they pressed into the cheering throng of crew that was awaiting them, an unpleasant spike of envy heavy through his chest.

"That circuitry isn't going to install itself," Jessica snapped.

"Your face isn't-"

"Shut up, Jake!" His sister shoved a torch into his gloved hand. "Just get it installed. I want to go and join the party and I can't until you finish shift."

"Just go." He waved her off. "I can handle this. I've been rebuilding and programming these things for years, I can handle some circuits."

She gave him a doubtful look.

"Seriously! I won't even try and link in, I promise. I like not having neural damage and not being in comas or dead."

Jessica nodded and grabbed the sides of the ladder, dropping back down towards the hangar floor. Jake didn't watch her go, just fidgeted with the boards some more.

He was good at his job. He was exceptional, even. He could write the codes of the Jaegar in his sleep and he could work on redesign and rebuild until he was blue in the face.

What he couldn't do was pilot them.

And if Jake wanted to do anything, it was pilot a Jaegar.

On the ground, Roque and Clay were the center of the spreading party. They'd been piloting Grande Morte for four years with no losses and three confirmed kills as of today. Team Porteous were enroute back from patrolling near Guam and in a couple of days their Jaegar Macabre Howl would be back in the hangar.

Jake would give his left arm to pilot a Jaegar but Jake, for all his physical fitness, high training scores and brilliant mind lacked the crucial element needed to pilot a Jaegar.

He slammed down his welding mask and started attaching the delicate boards to the neural interface core in the heavily protected stem of the control pod.

Jake couldn't Drift to save his dreams.

*~*~*

Jolene found Jake sulking in the control room.

Jolene and Pooch, Team Porteous of Macabre Howl, were the biggest pair of good natured assholes that Jake had ever met. They were diabetes inducing sweet with one another, so in love it actually made people spontaneously fertile and Jake wanted to punch them in the face and then felt like the world's worst person for even _thinking_ it.

Jolene punched Jake in the arm by way of greeting.

"Ow! What?! I didn't do anything this time!"

"You've being a brat to Jessica and you didn't even tell Roque or Clay congratulations."

"They're big boys getting enough sex to fill the internet with porn, they'll make do without my lovin'," he drawled. "Ow! Stop hitting me. Pooch! Your wife is being violent to me!"

"She'll do that," Pooch agreed serenely. "You're being bitchy again, Jensen. Go out. Get laid. Stop raining on the parade."

Pooch and Jolene met, fell in love and started piloting Jaegars. Jake wasn't sure in which order that happened. Presumably they met first, but he wasn't making assumptions about the sickening amount of love those two generated.

"How's Chat Noir's refit?"

"Someone keeps renaming my files _Gato Solitario_ , which is fucking cruel, but otherwise fine." He flicked a screwed up bit of paper at Pooch. "We got a new weapon's tech. _Aisha_." He leaned back. "Man, I'd Drift with her any day..."

"You wish," Pooch drawled.

"I do," Jake sighed. "I really do. Failing that, I'd love to have sex with her."

Jolene barked out laughter. "You're more likely to get her into the Drift than in her pants."

"She's watching Clay. Like a cobra waiting to strike." Pooch threw the paper back at Jake.

"Clay's an idiot. Roque would kill him if he banged her."

"Probably." The co-pilots were best friends with the most complicated relationship Jake had ever witnessed. One day, they were going to kill each other and no one was going to be shocked.

"Jake, being Drift incompatible isn't the end of the world."

Jessica had been talking to Jolene. "Jessica got at you. It's _nothing_ , seriously. Just the death of my hopes and dreams and childhood longings."

"She was right, you need to get laid." Jolene thumped him again. "Even you can get laid around here, Jensen."

"Thanks," he grumbled.

"Come on, there's got to be a girl or guy who turns your fancy. That isn't Aisha."

Jake's gaze flicked to movement in the doorway. Alvarez paused, looking back in at the three of them with his cold, empty gaze.

The three of them stared back.

"Howdy," Jake said.

Jolene inhaled sharply.

Alvarez tilted his hat to them and continued on.

Jolene sighed out her breath. "He doesn't like techs."

"He doesn't much like anyone." Jake shrugged and grinned. "I figure he has good reason. Doesn't mean I can't be friendly."

Jake hadn't been in this Shatterdome when the accident had happened. Someone had made a mistake recalibrating the power feeds in Chat Noir. It had had catastrophic consequences for the two pilots. The resulting power build up and explosion had thrown Alvarez free of the pod, hanging by the suit and neural feed as his co-pilot had burned to death in the control pod.

They'd still been in the Drift together when it happened. The whole technical team of the Chat Noir had been fired after the disaster.

Jake had been part of her replacement team, tasked with fixing the damage from the explosion. The Jaegar was easier to repair than the damage to her surviving pilot.

Jake figured he'd hate the world too if he'd gone through that. So he tried not to hold it against the man who actually had been through it.

Even the implied mention of the accident sent Jolene and Pooch quiet, reaching for each other's hands. They probably weren't even aware of how incredibly in synch they were anymore.

Honestly, Jake resented them more than he resented Alvarez. But Jake could admit to himself, he was a petty, envious person sometimes, even if it was only in his own head.

*~*~*

There was something sad about consistently eating meals with your sister.

It was like high school, being too young and under the protective wing of his sister, except Jake was twenty six now, trained for combat and Jaeger support and still seemed to spend every meal with Jessica and her team.

His team too, but he thought of them as her team. Just like she was 'Jessie' and he was 'Jessie's weird younger brother' to them.

"Jensen!"

He grinned at Jolene, picking his way through the mess to where they sat. He staked a claim at their table with his tray and shouldered himself between Jolene and someone he'd never learned a name for.

It took another long moment for him to realise he was sitting opposite Alvarez, the man between Pooch and Roque and taking up a lot of personal space for someone a head shorter than he was. 

"Hi."

He got a silent nod. Acknowledgement! He beamed and turned back to Jolene. "Why is it you're the only person in this place happy to let me sit next to them?"

"Because you talk too much," Roque stated. "Constantly. About everything."

"I wasn't asking you," Jake retorted. "Mister Grumpy-pants. You just don't like my shining and vivacious personality because you thrive on being dark and loomy and intimidating."

Clay's hand slapped over Roque's just as it started to tense around the butter knife. "No."

"See, that's what makes a good partnership. Complementing personalities. Roque has impulse control issues and Clay stops him from murdering the only guy who can retrofit the outdated systems on Morte."

"Jensen. Shut up. Or I will cut off your ear."

"With that knife? Nah. Rip. Rend. Okay, shutting up now!" Roque was getting a gleam in his eye that even Jake could recognise as a man on the edge of his patience.

Pooch just rolled his eyes and kept shoving food down.

But Alvarez... Jake would almost describe the look on his face as amused. On anyone else, maybe it would just be mild interest in the exchange, but he was fairly sure that Alvarez was not only mildly interested but actually _amused_.

He smiled. The smaller man didn't smile back, but his head canted slightly before he started to pick through his meal again.

Jake wasn't sure what to make of it. But it sent a pleasant spike through his chest, and that was enough to settle him in to actually eating rather than harassing Roque until he exploded.

*~*~*

He didn't have a chance to evaluate what that lunch had actually meant before Team Grande Morte did actually explode.

Normally, watching a team of pilots entering the neural handshake was a thing of beauty. The two discordant hemispheres displayed on the projection would shimmer and shift and then just click together, two people falling into synch with one another, submerging in the Drift and surfacing together.

That didn't happen.

Jolene and Pooch were already synched and deploying in Macabre Howl, the heavy Jaegar supported by the winches and braces of the helicopters taking them out to the Miracle Mile. Clay and Roque had stepped into their pod, but even to Jake, watching through the camera feeds, something had seemed off.

They had initiated neural handshake and their systems had spiked, diving into the Drift, started to match...

And the alarm blared. Roque shuddered out of Drift with a wrench that was only in his nervous system and not his movements, but Clay was still trying to sink in and it was clearly going wrong.

"You fucked her?!"

"Oh Christ," Jake murmured. "Clay fucked Aisha. Dome to Howl, we have a problem here, Grande Morte has failed to initiate handshake. Can you handle this?" He glanced to the readings again and shut off the comm to the Grande Morte. As much as he wanted to listen in to that fight happening, now was not the time for gossip and drama.

"Repeat, Dome. Did you just say _handshake failed to initiate_?" Pooch's voice was rich with disbelief. "We have a category three here, some fucking back up would be nice!"

"Yeah, failed to initiate." He winced just saying it. "We can get a team deployed from-"

"It's a category three, Jensen! What the fuck are we meant to do, entertain it until backup decides to arrive? Macabre Howl is not designed to take a sustained assault by itself."

Jake swallowed. He wished he had a better answer for Pooch. "Give me a few moments, okay? I'll work something out." He closed the line, roughly scrubbing his fingers through his hair. "Think, Jake, think. Dome to Morte, can you two please pretend to be adults and ready for neural handshake again?"

"We're fine," Clay snapped out. "We're ready. We'll sort it out after the kaiju's dead."

"Right. Good." He flipped the switches and brought up the display again. "Readying initialisation. Neural handshake in ten." He let the computer countdown, looking to Jessie in the seat next to him and then up to the doors as Marshal Stegler strode in, scowling.

"And... neural handshake engaging."

The hemispheres flared, started to synch.

And flashed red again, shaking apart.

"Come on! The fuck, guys, you can't leave Jolene and Pooch fucking hanging like this!" He banged his fist on the console.

"Jensen, move."

He stood up, letting Stegler take his seat. The Marshal started talking to Roque and Clay but to Jake, it was clear.

It wasn't that they wouldn't enter Drift together.

They _couldn't_. Roque was too angry, Clay was too... Clay at the moment. And if Clay had fucking told Roque about banging Aisha a day earlier, maybe they wouldn't be standing here, one team and one Jaegar down with a Category Three bearing down on them.

Macabre Howl needed back up. Without it- he didn't want to think of them not coming back because Roque and Clay had picked today to fuck their relationship and the Porteouses' chances of coming back.

He had to do something. He didn't know what, but he had to do _something_.

He turned and ran for the hangar bay, ignoring his sister calling his name and the Marshal trying to coax a successful neural handshake out of Clay and Roque. He didn't know what he'd do there, but he knew the only possible answer to Jolene and Pooch's survival.

Chat Noir.

*~*~*

The hangar door swung open in front of him, his armoured feet clanking on the metal flooring and then scraping as he skidded to a dead stop in front of the control pod doors.

Alvarez stood there silently, dark eyes watching Jake like he'd known he was coming. Like he was not only expected, but _late_.

He was wearing his suit, a dusky tan with the black cat emblazoned on the chest. There were still scorch marks from the accident over the back and shoulders.

Jake stared back, not quite able to find words for once in his life.

Alvarez's gaze held his, then flicked to the door and back again.

"Right. Yeah. We got people to save, kaiju to defeat... We are fucking insane, you realise that, right? Because no one ever can Drift with me, I am the undriftable and our brains will implode or something..."

Alvarez just kept looking at him expectantly.

"Right. Yeah. I know how to do this remotely and I've done the rebuild myself, but we're not at anything like full capacity, you get that, right? Right, of course you do." He followed the smaller man into the pod, stepping into the foot plates and starting a manual boot up.

He was doing this.

He was actually going to do this. He was going to try and not only Drift with a stranger, but to pilot and _steal_ a Jaegar with him.

"Neural handshake in fifteen," he stated, more from reflex than any need to warn. "Holy shit. Holy shit, man." He could swear he was actually jittering in his harness.

"Dome to Chat Noir, acknowledge! We have an unauthorised handshake countdown, what the hell is going on?!"

"Hey, Stegler," Jake chuckled nervously. "We're just taking her for a stroll along the beach, maybe lay down some cover fire for Macabre Howl, save the world and all that."

"Jensen? Get the hell out of my Jaegar, Jensen!"

" _My_ jaegar," someone growled and holy shit, that was _Alvarez_ , that low, rumbling voice was Alvarez.

"Initialising neural handshake," the computer informed them and the Drift rushed over Jake.

*~*~*

He had a family of five sisters and he was the middle child and his parents loved them all despite being run off their feet and there was always time for each and every child.

He had one older sister and their parents only knew they existed to scream at them.

He never stood out and made it the habit of a lifetime to stay that way, to vanish into the shadows of the louder people.

He always stood out and made sure no one ever forgot him again.

His head was empty but for the silencing scream of Omah's death throes as the fire cooked him in his suit.

His head never had space for anything, especially not silences and screams.

They surfaced with a gasp and Chat Noir lifted her head, power flooding her systems.

The computer dutifully intoned, "Neural handshake stable. Systems online."

*~*~*

Macabre howl had been driven back inside the Miracle Mile.

The heavy set Jaegar was putting up a good fight but he was never built for a sustained hand to hand combat by himself. The newest Kaiju–not so affectionately labelled 'Max', short for 'Maxilla' because of both its heavy protruding heads– was snapping on both sides at the Jaeger's grappling hands.

Both shoulders had taken damage and inside, both Jolene and Pooch were feeling the strain of the buckling systems.

Then, one of the heads exploded out through the right side.

The kaiju screamed, attention whipping from Macabre Howl to further out to sea.

Chat Noir's head tilted and the hand reached out again, another truck sized shell loading from the ammo bank into the inbuilt rifle. Her main weapon, the dual laser artillery, was still offline and depowered but her back up ranged weapons hadn't been damaged in the accident which had decommissioned her.

Max roared with both heads, focusing on the new threat as Chat Noir braced again and launched a second shot.

The head twisted to move out of the way, but Macabre Howl was already shoving the kaiju back into the path of the bullet. It missed the head but blew into the junction of the two necks, sending both heads screaming again with rage. It lashed out at Macabre howl, heavy claws screeching through metal, rending off an armour plate which crashed into the waves below.

The jaegar stepped back and Max pressed the assault.

A third bullet into the back got the monster's attention again. Macabre Howl remained still and quiet as Max spun around, sinking into the ocean and tail flicking to propel it towards Chat Noir.

The small jaegar turned and started to move away. Her armour was incomplete and her close combat weapons were yet to be reinstalled. A single good hit from Max would shred the vulnerable torso and send the control pod plummeting to the ocean.

It was then that Macabre Howl launched himself.

He grabbed the tail and hauled, forcing the kaiju out of the ocean, head down and rear legs kicking for traction. Another two shots from Chat Noir and the beast was nearly halved. Two more into the water and the monster fell still and lifeless.

The two jaegars straightened up and turned to head for home.

*~*~*

Jake stared at Cougar.

Not Alvarez. Cougar. It was what Omah had always called him, like a cougar in his dusky tan armour, with his tanned skin and watchful gaze.

Cougar stared back at Jake.

Not Jensen. Jake. Because Jensen was affectionate but still distant, what everyone used when they were exasperated with him.

Chat Noir shuddered back into her restraints, the winches taking the weight as her power systems shut down.

The neural handshake ended, but Jake could still feel the deep silences and echoes of Cougar pressing around him, trying to pull in the noise and quiet it. He could see in Cougar's gaze the same thing, the overwhelming emptiness of Omah's death trying to pull him back under.

Jake pulled free from the harness, met Cougar halfway, hugging him tightly, shaking with adrenaline and shock and about a million other things that rushed his mind and body at once because they'd _done_ it, they fought a kaiju, they killed a kaiju, they fucking stole a Jaeger and walked it out into battle with Macabre Howl and back again.

They _Drifted_.

Stegler was going to have their fucking heads. Jess was going to kill him so badly, then put him back together and then kill him slowly to make sure he got the point.

Cougar leaned back and grinned at him, a slash of white, even teeth across his tanned face.

Jake grinned back and they clunked their heads together lightly.

Below, the party was already starting around Pooch and Jolene, people screaming and cheering for them to get down there, to be the centre of it all, to be someone among a crowd of thousands.

They both started laughing. Cougar leaned into Jake; Jake had already lifted his arm to drape over the other man's shoulders.

Fuck 'em.


End file.
